Le Corbusier: Villa Savoye, Poissy 1929

• Le Corbusier 1887-1965 Biography

  • Charles Edouard Jeanneret
  • Attended municipal art school in La-Chaux-de-Fonds
  • Moved to Paris 1917 where opened architectural practice but rejected cubism and initiated a new style "purism" and wrote for L'Espirit Nouveau
  • Published 'Towards an Architecture', 1923
  • Exhibited at Pavilion of the Espirit Nouveau, Paris 1925 including his model for Plan Voisin
• Le Corbusier is famous for stating, “The house is a machine for living.”
• Pilotis - the house is raised on reinforced concrete stilts to seperate it from the earth, allowing the land to flow underneath, The white box of the piano nobile appears to float
• Open plan is made possible through the elimination of load bearing walls and the use of glass partitions to separate space without hindering the openness of the structure.
• Free façade - reinforced concrete frames allowed free planning of exterior walls and liberal use of glass. Creates the illusion of the building floating.
• In response to his aspirations and admiration of mechanized design, Le Corbusier established “The Five Points Of Architecture", which is simply a list of prescribed elements to be incorporated in the design. The Five Points of architecture can be thought of as Le Corbusier’s modern interpretation of Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, not literally in the sense of an instructional manual for architects, but rather a checklist of necessary components of design.
• The pilotis that support the decks, the ribbon windows that run alongside the hull, the ramps providing a moment of egress from deck to deck; all of these aspects served as the foundation of the Five Points of Architecture and are found in the overall composition of Villa Savoye.
• Upon entering the site, the house appears to be floating above the forested picturesque background supported by slender pilotis that seem to dissolve among the tree line, as the lower level is also painted green to allude to the perception of a floating volume.
• Curved glass façade on the lower level that is formed to match the turning radius of automobiles of 1929 so that when the owner drives underneath the larger volume they can pull into the garage with ease of a slight turn.
• The ribbon windows begin to play with the perception of interior and exterior, which does not fully become expressed until once inside.
• Estimated cost F500,000, actual cost F900,000
• Le Corbusier makes repeated references to the Parthenon - "perfect result of this standardisation process"

  Looked upon his epoch of architecture and thought that it had failed this perfect composition of living.
• Curvature of the massing on the ground level is catered to the precise degree at which the car turns into the drive.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSdFrTLAse0 - ground floor